Rap – among the most globalised forms of music – has inspired a steadily growing body of literature that addresses its cultural impact in the US and abroad (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2001; Alim et al. Reference Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook2009; Terkourafi Reference Terkourafi2010). Cuban rap has, in particular, prompted scholarly and public debate on cultural connections between the US and its long-estranged neighbour. Buena Vista in the Club contributes to this literature as well as to Popular Music Studies, presenting an in-depth analysis of Cuban hip hop scenes during the 1990s and 2000s. Baker examines the music's relationship with the ideals and institutions of the Cuban state, the rise of the popular dance music reggaetón, race and place, and rap's international audiences and scholars.
Baker's use of the phrase ‘buena vista’ in the book's title indicates the importance he places on the political and cultural power of vision, particularly in reference to the highly successful album by the Buena Vista Social Club (BVSC). The ‘good view’ here is an idealised perspective imposed by foreign audiences for whom Cuba represents an escape from their own hypercommercialised cultural worlds. For instance, the success of the BVSC album produced by Ry Cooder (1997) and the documentary directed by Wim Wenders (1999) demonstrate the extent that foreign markets influence the construction of Cuban musical identity. The album, which explores Cuba's mid-20th-century musical ‘golden era’, has become the ‘primary lens through which international audiences observe Cuba’ and as a result a powerful model against which contemporary Cuban musicians are measured (p. 2). This perspective – evident in Wim Wenders’ documentary – portrays Cuba and its music as inhabiting a distant time and ‘lost world’, unconnected to the United States and hence protected from change and modernisation. There is an alternative to this narrative, what George Lipsitz might call a ‘hidden history’, which tells of African American and Afro-Cuban musical exchanges after the 1962 embargo.
Many international fans of the BVSC would be surprised by the role of hip hop in the lives of Cuba's younger generations and state institutions. In Chapter 1, Baker explores the ‘discursive strategies’ of Cuban rappers, ‘intermediary’ figures and state officials to establish a place for the music in public policy during the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the core of rap's relationship with the state are concepts of resistance and revolution as articulated by the Cuban state and presented in rap lyrics. While hip hop and the Cuban state share a political ideology, the bureaucracy of Cuban state agencies created a complex relationship with hip hop. Central to the discourse surrounding the institutionalisation of hip hop in Cuba were intermediary figures such as producer Pablo Herrera and journalist and DJ Ariel Fernandez, who connected the goals of the Cuban Revolution with the values of Cuban rappers. Other discursive strategies during this period included the emphasis of African rather than the North American roots of hip hop as well as Cuba's adeptness at adapting North American music.
Chapter 2 examines hip hop's relationship to reggaetón, a form of popular dance music from Puerto Rico that has, in the past decade, far outweighed rap's popularity in Cuba. Baker argues that reggaetón, which is often blamed for replacing the socially conscious messages of Cuban rap with escapist dance music, has not received much scholarly attention because it fails to adopt a strong nationalist identity. Baker argues instead that reggaetón reflects the newer generation's changing relationship with time, the Revolution and racial identity. For example, Baker uses dancing in reggaetón to address the Cuban body as a site of liberation from State restrictions on speech and illegal economies (p. 137). Baker clearly wishes to expand understandings of revolution as intellectually driven to include the realm of the body.
Although Baker does not claim to come to this topic as an ‘insider’ (i.e. as a Cuban, African American or ‘hip hop head’) his research reflects a strong rapport with the key figures and artists that take centre stage in the book. Chapter 3 opens with a particularly vibrant description of a night in Havana where Baker accompanied a friend to an open-air rap concert followed by a bus ride – stage to an impromptu rap performance – to an all-night house party where locals danced to US hip hop. From this brief ethnographic description Baker extracts the theme of space as a key element in the articulation of Cuban rap. Baker addresses the issue of race within a larger discussion of space. As he states, hip hop is ‘space music as much as race music’ (p. 182). In this context Baker analyses how Cuban rap reflects and is shaped by the urban realities of Havana. In approaching race as it is expressed in the control and struggle over space, Baker draws from the scholarship of Murray Forman whose book The ’Hood Comes First (Reference Forman2002) has contributed to examining music and race as they are manifested in the contestation of urban space.
In Chapter 4, Baker turns his ‘revisionist glance’ to scholarship on race, the Revolution and rap in Cuba, questioning the emphasis on Cuban rap as an ‘impetus for redefining or revolutionizing blackness in Cuba’ (p. 22). In this sense, this final chapter deals most explicitly with the politics of representation as they have played out in Cuba–US cultural exchange events as well as scholarship and journalism from both Cuba and abroad. Baker effectively integrates his ethnographic and historical analyses with his critique of hip hop scholars such as Sujatha Fernandes, Alan West-Durán and Marc Perry. Baker takes particular issue with how Cuban hip hop has been represented on the international stage, criticising the myths that emerge in Cuban hip hop studies as a result of scholars, journalists and documentary filmmakers accepting rather than questioning hip hop discourses about race, economic viability, nationalism and state ideologies. For example, Baker examines the narrative that hip hop in Havana is a unified black movement heavily reliant on Afro-Cuban musical traditions. He also challenges the notion that Cuban hip hop is comprised of distinct factions that can be divided between underground and commercial camps and embraces reggaetón as an important topic of study in relationship to rap. In this sense, Baker's study is a powerful example of facing rather than effacing the contradictions that complicate common narratives of globalisation, race, identity and hip hop.
Buena Vista is Baker's second book on music in Latin America and is a valuable contribution to Duke University Press's Refiguring American Music series. This series, edited by Ronald Radano and Josh Kun, questions and confronts the dominant narratives framing the study of American music. In meeting the broad aims of the series, Baker throws a wide net that encompasses hip hop and reggaetón, as well as frameworks of race, politics, economies, globalisation and urban studies. It speaks greatly of Baker that this book maintains a sense of immediacy and detail as these broad strands are woven together. Baker's contribution will undoubtedly lead to further debate on Cuban hip hop, particularly in the context of Marc Perry's forthcoming book, Revolutionizing Blackness: Hip Hop in Late Socialist Cuba, which is scheduled to be released as part of the Refiguring American Music series.
